Former Obama DOD Official Gives Up the Crooked Trump/Russia Game
An interesting development has come to light regarding the so-called Trump-Russia story. Someone — seems to be the intrepid bloggers at the Conservative Tree House — uncovered an interview from MSNBC’s Morning Joe on 3/2/2017 with a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Obama Administration, one Dr Evelyn Farkas.
The interview (transcribed here and here) is interesting for what it reveals — for a PhD, Farkas seems quite the fool, rambling on circuitously, apparently out of her depth and eager to make the most of her moment in the spotlight — Dr Farkas seeming to confirm the substance of what President Trump asserted in his controversial 3/4/2017 ‘Obama wiretapping’ tweets.
First of all, this interview clearly illustrates what hacks MSNBC are in general and Mika Brzezinski in particular; Brzezinski was especially outraged — practically in tears — by the allegations President Trump made in his 3/4 tweet when, just days before, she had interviewed a guest who admitted to substantially the same thing. Not really up on how the whole journalism thing works, eh Mika?
That said, it’s worthwhile to consider Dr Farkas’ comments on a point-by-point basis:
[If the Trump Administration] found out how we knew what we knew about their … the Trump staff dealing with Russians — that they would try to compromise those sources and methods, meaning we no longer have access to that intelligence… We have very good intelligence on Russia.
This statement reads like a tacit admission that the rules regarding foreign surveillance were abused — specifically, despite the fact that gathering intelligence on a foreign target was the pretext of the surveillance, the real targets were Americans (“the Trump staff”). This interpretation is supported by Obama’s last minute signing of new rules revising Executive Order 12333 (detail here) which greatly expanded the dissemination of raw intelligence throughout the Federal bureaucracy.
I was urging my former colleagues and, frankly speaking, the people on the Hill, it was more actually aimed at telling the Hill people, get as much information as you can, get as much intelligence as you can, before President Obama leaves the administration… So then I had talked to some of my former colleagues and I knew that they were trying to also help get information to the Hill.
According to Pentagon records, Dr Farkas left government service in September 2015. If so, the communications she was carrying on with her ‘former colleagues’ (presumably DOD staffers) were very likely illegal, part of a greater conspiracy to violate rules regarding the so-called ‘unmasking’ of Americans caught up in the surveillance of foreign targets. Farkas was also very likely in violation of her separation agreement, which almost certainly required her to immediately disclose the improper use of classified materials.
That’s why you have the leaking.
Dr Farkas seems to admit that the subsequent leaking was the intended purpose for the dissemination of the intelligence (“…get as much information as you can, get as much intelligence as you can, before President Obama leaves the administration…”) which is a clear violation of Federal law.
Over the course of the past three weeks — from President Trump’s 3/4 tweets through the information uncovered by Chairman Nunes and now what Dr Farkas revealed in her earlier interview — it’s become clear that there was some systematic effort by Obama political appointees to use classified information with the intended purpose of undermining the Trump Administration.